Why your content doesn't generate leads and how to fix it - Anastasia Novikova|SaaS Founders Podcast

Hi everybody, my name is Dima Rodenko. I'm the founder of SaaS founder community helping founders or software development companies to find newbie clients with LinkedIn. Today I welcome Anastasia Novikova. She's CEO of Haka Media and her expertise in crypto, blockchain I gaming IT and real estate projects. That's why we are happy to meet Anastasia here. And she's familiar with complex content marketing projects. Link building, CEO influences, marketing campaign. That's what hacker media does. Hi Anastasia, glad to see you.

Hi. Neutral. Glad to see you too.

Yeah, thank you. So, thank you for the time. I would like to ask several questions. How from your experience. Well, what should founders of software development companies do in current situation? Because you see that we, we face some decline in demand. In demand and let's say we, we need to put more efforts to get more leads and get more clients. What, what's your perspective? How. What will you advise to founders of software development companies? How can they get more leads with the tools that you're familiar with?

Well of course it depends a lot on every particular case and every particular situation. How develop channels for every company we are talking about. So you are the most familiar with LinkedIn. Let's just take it as an example. So if you have an established profile with a lot of connections, for example and you are doing some lead generation campaigns and for now for example, maybe they don't work with you yet or they don't follow the best practices yet, so they are not that efficient as they could be. The best would be to combine LinkedIn also with some of the website development efforts. So no matter if you have a huge website with different blog posts covering everything related to your expertise, or if you have just a few posts and maybe a few pages on the website, that's still okay. You can use your content as the follow up for your current LinkedIn connections and you can build these chains of messages including the content that you have. And Mostly talking to LinkedIn connections can also bring you some new ideas. What can you write about on your blog? So blog is not only the place for the SEO articles only and some topics might come from your sales conversations, pre sales and sales conversations and chats on LinkedIn as well. So I would firstly say like analyze what, what is the state of your current marketing channels? All of them like social media website, do you do any SEO or you never did anything in these regards. And then think about like what what is the low hanging fruit as some of my customers say. So maybe some of the channels they are developed, but maybe you are not getting that many conversions from, from there yet. And with the current market situation, this is just probably one of these things you can do. But I consider that you also know who is your customer, whom you're trying to sell, what is your like biggest strong side and what are your strengths overall, what are your special, what is your expertise? So if you know all this, then it will be much easier of course. But if you don't, then probably we need to take a few steps back, not thinking about new trends and strategies and just think about who could be your best customer for now, even in current situation.

Yeah, definitely. I definitely agree for the ICP and fall for the initial steps for the analysis. But what I see now from, let's say from the profiles of the founders, basically as the founders, they have very extensive network of contracts and they normally communicate with a huge amount of people and they've got a lot of potential clients in their networks. So what type of content and what should be the strategy? I would say let's speak more, more general. So for example, they have a huge network. Some of the people in the network, they are potentially their potential clients. What should they post in their profiles to attract potential leads? Well, show me some example. It will be awesome to understand maybe how it works. So what content should be posted?

Well, ideally, of course it should be like a line or kind of a storyline behind this content plan. So I prefer to talk about stories now because more and more studies they still talk about how storytelling is efficient. But these stories, they should be like real or you know, they should come from, from your experience, not just, you know, trying to talk about some topics which you kind of, you're interested in them because you work with them, but they don't touch you deeply. So just to give you an example, you might work with Fintech for example, or cryptocurrency financial projects. If you don't do anything with the crypto yourself. All these news posts and everything, they will be a bit, you know, like not personalized. You you'll just, you'll be just reposting news. Like when my, some of my customers come and tell, okay, we want to publish some news from the industries we are working with. I'm telling them, okay, are you, will you do this more quickly than the news outlets? Or like what would be the benefit of reading news exactly from you? Or if you want to share your own perspective, then okay, why your customers or potential customers should read your perspective. If you have some special expertise or opinion which is worth listening to then definitely you should explain first like why you would do this. So probably first post would be nice to have as a story like who you are, why they should listen to you at all and what do you plan to talk about and then you can talk. I see a lot of founders now. They're also adding some personal posts, maybe adding pictures, talking about their families, their kids and something that's going on in their personal life. And they try to connect this also with their business. This is not too bad. Just I believe you should keep it in, in some kind of balance. So like probably 70% of your business content or 75 and maybe some 25 could be related to your personal life and not just only family, maybe hobbies and something else and they can also be connected to your business. So for instance, something happened in, in your life. So I'm, I'm telling them I still didn't post this, but I'm talking about this for a while. I have a daughter, she's one and a half and she's a perfect image of a manager. So when she wants something, she's talking just like few words and maybe some phrases, but not like you can have a complete conversation with her, but when she wants something, she's just coming to you, she's taking your hand. No matter if it's like me, my husband or yesterday it happened just to a mom in the group of foreigners we are hanging out with. So she just came there and took her hand and took her to a swing where she wanted to go. And then she's showing like so I want to go there. Just pick me up. Yeah, put me here. And then of course she's trying to move, she's trying to show that she wants to swing. So like no matter like if you can talk or you can't talk, you can lead someone like showing what, what you, what you want to do. And this is the best like to show with your own, you know, example or something. And this is some post that can lead to like this story opening can lead to a post related to your management style or even leadership. So like how like this, this looks like you know, little, little leader who is just showing what she wants and getting where she wants or maybe even getting to the goal where, where you want, which you want to. Ach. So and this type of stories, they work amazingly well. We did some kind of newsletter a while ago and my colleagues, they were trying to take stories even from films they're watching. And the best what happened our customers on the calls, they were like One of the newsletters, it was related to Ocean 7 film. And they were also talking about management style of this group. And one of my customers told me oh, you had an amazing newsletter about Ocean. And I was, I thought like I didn't get it. Okay, which Ocean? We didn't write anything about Ocean. But then I understood that he's talking about this particular email and the. The film. So like when they read stories and that that particular newsletter was just leading them to an article on some of the management advices for working with. Like when you work with the outsourcing, when you work just with the remote software developers. Like what, what kind of advices we could give. We shared it in the post and made a newsletter with this type of story and these stories, they just stay in your mind. So like my best recommendation would be to build this based on stories. Of course not every day you will have some personalized stories. But you can try to write and find these stories and different things that surround you. And you can build this content plan of course also based on that. It is not easy to do just for the content marketing or an agency if this the the one is working for you. So you need also to give these ideas or maybe share this type of stories you have from your day to day life and plan together. But then it will work the best. And some stories might be more work related. Something happened to you at the conference, at a call with the lead. Maybe they told you something and some of them might be personal stories. And this is how you can also build this content plan and share some content, some links to events if you are talking about them and other things in this context.

Okay, very nice. So I, I would say that we can switch from content is a king. A story is a king, right? From content to story number one. And initially I got a question what are the sources of the stories? And your reply actually was like we. We should take a content from everyday life. So from everything that happens around us.

From not only that, yeah, yeah. But that is also a good, good source like for that. Of course if you have your day to day life besides work, it will be more easy.

Okay.

So yeah, but this is, this is one of one of the ways or you can read. If you read a lot, you can also take a lot of stories from there you have ideas. But for entrepreneurs this usually is not too hard because head is usually full of different things related to what we read, what we saw an opportunity or something like that even we can talk about some opportunities that we see for different Businesses and some issues that we see they are not fixed yet. And like why no one still created or invented something to fix particular issue we are all struggling with.

Yeah, sure, definitely. I see that you help to reveal the uniqueness of the personality via the content and thus to show, okay, this person is different from. From others because he or she thinks about usual things unusual way. Okay, that's good, it's clear, it's. It's very nice. But if we speak about more, let's say practical way. Well, it is practical anyway. But usually people say, okay, I want more leads. If I use content, it will be my marketing channel. How many? Let's say what should I invest in in terms of time, energy, money into the content marketing and what will I get back after? Because founders and entrepreneurs, they usually consider every marketing dollar is investment. And I think that doing content marketing it really takes a lot of time thought on energy or money. It can be compensated with the money. You can have specialists, whatever. Can you give some examples or some idea of the of the payback? For example, okay, we need to spend this amount of money to get this delta. Can we connect these dots together or it's not possible?

Well, pretty hard because in content marketing and in calculating return of investment, first it depends a lot on how much you invest from the day one. And if you're talking about it from the SEO perspective, it a lot depends on what is your domain, how old is it, did you do any optimization? Did you invest in link building and stuff like that? So this will impact how your content will rank and if you worked on the content yourself, or if someone worked on it and considered some keywords and stuff, it will also impact if this content is already performing or if it is not, then something needs to be done with that. So there are a lot of dependencies over here. What I can tell. So from one side, if companies just want to start doing something with content marketing, they can do and start with just, I don't know, having investing even $1,000 per month. But of course they shouldn't expect that in six months they will have a return of investment and incoming leads. So this is just something that they can do. And this is worth doing as early as, as possible. Because when it, when we are talking for when we are talking about website content and SEO, the history and how, how early you start, this matters matters a lot. And in the same time, I usually recommend combining content marketing. If you don't have complete budget, for instance, you can't invest maybe even 3,5000 per month. If you can't invest these amounts from the day one to have like more quicker results. So with these amounts you can see some results already in half a year. But I'm not talking again about the stream of leads. This all depends on the niche also and your competition. So if you're trying to compete with, I don't know, just simple WordPress website development and you chose some of the keywords that are pretty competitive, then you shouldn't expect much even in three to six months, even with three and 5,000. So I'm trying to show like with all these dependencies, pretty hard to say, but we did some, some work even for, for the websites that were new in the business, at least with like minimum investment they could see traffic to their content and their articles. And then the next step, you need to work already on conversions which are not only related to SEO efforts, but also it depends on what is your design, how linked are your pages and where is this track coming from, if it is good quality, and so on and so forth. So I would definitely tell that this is a long, long way. And some agencies, they offer you a plan, okay, like in six months you will see some traffic and leads. I can tell that most likely you will see traffic. Not sure, I'm not sure that no matter what are the keywords and an investment right now with all the competition, it is pretty hard to get leads exactly coming to you and sending you requests on the website, even in six months. But definitely you may see something. And also it's hard to say which quality would have these leads. So just consider if you're going this way, going into content marketing overall, like SEO is just only one part of this whole strategy which can push your content higher, which can get more traffic through the search engines. And don't forget that now people are searching a lot with ChatGPT and all the AI helpers and we see this also this traffic is coming and still all the agencies are now starting to explore how to optimize for that. So this is again a big opportunity. Again there is a big opportunity with the voice search, with the videos and again we don't know like if you want, if you can invest in here or not. But probably the most specific answer I can give that like at least and many agencies say this so like at least half a year you need to see some result. But everything else depends on what you did before in past, what are your investment and which niche are you in and the best results and quicker results you can see if you are targeting your Focus on some specific audiences and you try to be unique. So again, stand out. Not just try to be another web or software development company competing for this type of high volume keywords, but highly competitive ones as well. But try to be more specific and offer some specific service like if you have some platform that can help you create chatbots, for example, more quickly, maybe in particular time, two days, three days, maybe even you have the basic baseline estimation, then do this, show this on your website, on your landing page. This will help help a lot to stand out and to promote these type of things.

Oh, nice. Okay, I get it. From my perspective, what I see, we track everything we can and we usually ask our salespeople to measure the. Let's say how warm. What is the difference? Let's say sales readiness from the leads. And what I see from my. We got, we've got about 16 channels that we use to attract leads. And I see that content marketing in general, I would say the content that we are posting, the videos, etc. I would say that these people are about 10 to 15% warmer, let's say than average than people that come from advertising or other sources. So that's why, that's, that's because of the trust, maybe because people see, people understand, people get used to and then people convert and other outcome that I can share from my side that content in many cases now it's available source of leads for core, but it also helps to worm the leads much more and push them to the bottom of the funnel. So because when people come and say okay, we don't know you, but when they, when they interact with the, with the content, they say okay, I saw you there, there and there. Okay, you might be good in what you are speaking about. So that's why we're gonna talk. So there is like direct, like a direct response. Okay, the leads are warmer and another source that we can warm leads from another channels that we attract from advertising to let's say to make themselves ready with the content.

Yeah, definitely. And, and also video content is pretty powerful tool by itself. So it is also searchable. But of course you shouldn't expect that like if you will be posting different videos on your topic, that again, leads will start coming a lot. But if you will be adding videos maybe even to your blog posts or landing pages and you will post content related to your company and not only related to how to work without sourcing companies, but more like your expertise in some particular niche. Like okay, talking back about the chatbots, like how to launch it, maybe some Business related matters. If you are the SEO, if you are the CTO and you are also good at speaking, presenting the topics, you can also have a channel and you can talk more on the technical side. So maybe about some architecture of the web platforms you are working on or maybe you can share some. Some advices or maybe daily type of things but not too deep in technology. So like without any pieces of code probably, but more on the higher level. So the management people who might be your decision makers can just search these type of things. But yes, videos are definitely the best. And of course like since when you just. When you read these are just words but when you and listen to someone, this is also your voice and when you see someone like we are getting more and more signals from the other person and we can see okay yes, I like this, this guy and I want to work with him.

Okay, what types of content perform better? Let's say video of videos of fine. For example on LinkedIn I see that LinkedIn let's say if you post something with video there are let's say double. Double number of impressions. That's good. But what other let's say maybe specific things that works nice. For example, what can you advise to our subscribers?

Well, I definitely. I would probably start from what I will try to not to do or what I know that some companies are doing and they don't get much results with. So with all the AI tools now everyone wants to use. Okay, let's go to chat GPT it will create me perfect content plan. Or maybe you go to another tool. There are now tons and tons of them. I can't even name all that can generate me something starting with strategy, ending with the ready made content just and image image like of course also make an image with the AI tool. So like one AI tool makes an image, the other one creates text and then you post it all on LinkedIn. I read recently some stats that this type of content doesn't perform well. Unfortunately there were not many links to the sources of the stats. So this is now just like I'm referencing the post and I can see that some of the posts in my feed I can easily see if that is AI generated or not. And I don't see that many of them when they are AI generated in the feed like when you check suggested posts. But when you search for the topic, for the keyword or maybe just for some topic you see a lot of them. And I was once looking for particular information on the topic and I had to scroll maybe a few pages and I found maybe two or three posts only among at least 100 that were more or less interesting. And they were, they had some insights. All the others, they were somehow AI generated or rewritten from the other posts. And something like, they were absolutely not useful or not interesting to read. So this is pretty hard now not to use this type of tools, but I see that real pictures, like photos which you can take with your phone, they work really good. AI pictures, they perform not so good even comparing to cliparts and stuff like that. And also for pictures, if you can't take any good pictures, not everyone can. You can just, you can search and like from different photo banks, you can buy them. But pictures are always working better. Even on your website, if you have pictures of yourself, of your team, the more you have them, the more trust you build. Also from the same reason, like these videos and pictures, people can see you. So for LinkedIn, pictures work well, real pictures, human texts work well, or text with human perspective. So I know that some people, again, they can't write well, or maybe they are ashamed of their English or any other language level and they just want these tools to reshape their text and make them look better. But just you need to see how the text is created and formulated. Because often AI tools, they have particular style and particular structure of sentences they're using, which are mostly without your, without an opinion overall. So they are not using that many IV type of words, which makes text also like faceless. And I work with text a lot. So this type of small things, they matter. Of course writers also can do some of them, they have this type of style, more like machine type. But a lot of humans, they still can do if with your input, with your advice, they can add it somewhere into the post. So more posts with some of the insights, some of your own, maybe conclusions and thoughts that will work best. And don't worry if the post is maybe sometimes not perfectly structured. Not everyone thinks as a perfect structure. A lot of people, they are creative and their mind just reads these thoughts like as. As they are.

Okay, okay, I get it. So first we can hire someone to make it better. And the most important, we can keep it human without, let's say this faceless, let's say without losing the, the spirit, I would say. Right. By the way, there are certain, let's say solution like they call it humanizers. When you input some AI generated text and then they try to humanize it, they change the text in a certain way. At least that the robots would understand that it's not let's say it's, it's not. It was not AI generated. What do you think about this stuff?

Stuff?

Do really these humanizers help to keep the spirit or we need something else for that?

Well, it depends. But mostly when we worked with this type of tools, they were trying to rephrase the text, sometimes changing some words into less used ones. So more, you know, more fancy synonyms which are like less frequently used in text and the text became even harder to read. So not every tool keeps the style and they are also trying to optimize text technically. So with, with the AI detection again like with the development of AI, development of AI detection and this anti detection mechanism, they're trying to run one after another. And definitely at one certain points the tools will improve themselves. But for now, yeah, those, they are pretty good this humanizers at making text technically unique. And do not forget about uniqueness. So recently also Google was selling that text that is generated with the AI which is posted on your website. It can be considered also as the plagiarism because like if you didn't write it or generated it, so it is kind of plagiarism. So and plagiarized content is not something you want to publish on your website. That is why usually we warn our customers against this. But talking back about the humanizers, they. They can technically optimize your AI generated content to be not recognized as an AI, but it might not be easy to read. So your own way and your own pass on how to get your Perfect content for LinkedIn or for the website. Of course you can try different tools. Maybe you write yourself well or you find a content writer who writes the way you like for LinkedIn. Again, they don't punish exactly you for writing content with the AI tools, just it's the matter of the audience. They don't always prefer if they can feel the content is not human humanly made. So maybe again some of the AI tools might be best for you to write posts and you can then tweak them and then post them or maybe someone can edit them afterwards. But for now it looks like still some human input is critical both on the page time when you just create the post idea and then when you finalize the post. But in time of course it, it may, it may change. So with human errors just be, be pretty careful too.

Yeah. Okay, so you mean that they are technically good, but they don't keep the spirit, they don't keep the personal touch. So that's why they, the people can, can Perform better and people can touch.

Better and sometimes they make texts hard to read. That is okay.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, it's good. Okay, that's fine. I get it. So we need stories. We need to extract stories from our personal life and from our, from say from our head, from our background. We need to do it regularly. Okay. If we speak about regularity, how often should we post the content? Because some people say you should be number one in quantity, right? So you should be, you should post 5, 7, 8 pieces of content per day to be, let's say online with your audience, etc. But we understand that as a founders, we've got a huge amount of work to do, so it's not possible. I would say it's very hard to rebuild your life for, for this content style. And what do you think about that? How many pieces should be posted? What are the possible strategies for that?

I would say consistency is like another parameter that is more important. So if you will post five posts in one day, but then nothing tomorrow, then I'm not sure this is the good pace for you. So I would say you can start even from one or two posts per week, or even one post in two weeks if this is something you can produce first. And ideally of course you can write a few posts before starting. So then you can just have a few of them if you didn't have time to write something new. And again like you can have a content plan even like for one month or a few months, depends on how far you want to plan. So this is also okay to start with this number of posts, ideally a few posts per week. This is okay. This is pretty much enough if you, I mean maybe three, three to five. So even like if it will be one post a day or sometimes it will be just like maybe three posts a week. This is also okay. So there is nothing like critical number of regularity for post on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is still, it is not exactly Instagram or Facebook. So not everyone still knows how to treat it. So not it's a business network, business social network. But you wanted to share something personal there too. But not just like posting a picture on some question, you know, quick one. But I see how, how some of the founders, they, they just post even quick text notes, even some quick ideas and stuff like that from. Or insights they have during the day. And this is also like good enough to. To do. But it can be your style if you have this type of insights on a regular basis. So like from one to posts in two weeks to three to five posts a week. This, this type of regularity seems pretty normal over there now.

Okay. Yeah, definitely. Okay, so I get for the content, but also you also work with the influencers and partnerships. And collaborations. I would like to speak about it as well. If we speak about influencers, I see that if we speak about B2B the influencers are super heavy to reach. They are overwhelmed. What do you think about that? For example, if we have a, let's say a certain solution or we have a, let's say a service. How can a small software development companies can work with influencers? What can be, let's say the approach to them?

Well, I would definitely warn against working with influencers for small companies because usually influencers, if they're like okay, these are professional influencers, then they usually charge you for some of the programs or collaboration you do with them if they will mention you. So they do business on that. And this usually doesn't cost you even a few hundred. Sometimes it can be more. And you can't get regular and stable amount of leads just from one collaboration. So you need to invest in testing, maybe test a bunch of influencers and then see which one performs best for you. And with our sales pipeline in software development for example, it is taking even a few months sometimes to see if these leads, if we got any leads, if these leads will be closed. So this is pretty tricky. Advertisement is also pretty tricky for software development and outsourcing. But with it you can work maybe on webinars or stuff like that where you can see more leads and which will convert better with influencers might be also same. So you can agree with some influencer on some like topic to share information about your webinar or something. So action which you will be sharing might be more simple. And if you are just trying to push your company name to some influencers video, I'm not sure this will be a good pass here. And we work a lot with influencers for crypto in this type of markets. Even on this B2C basis I can tell they they not always return you even like what, what you invested no matter how how much money you put in there. But sometimes you can find these unique gems who are like really good, whose audience is really good. This is also important and you can't know it without testing. Testing needs money. So and usually these are like a few thousands. You need to invest at least to test a few influencers and for it and software outsourcing, I'm not sure okay, this is a good channel. You want to pursue okay, that's good.

To have a clear. No, it's, it's okay because you know that you shouldn't go that, that's definitely true. Okay. But if you speak about partnerships and collaboration, for example, I think that for example, if you can see the fintech or some, some other areas, there is certain infrastructure, ecosystems and of course we can find some potential partners of the same size that we are. We can, we, we don't speak about let's say, let's say big companies etc. But how to motivate these people. Okay, they, they want, let's say they have their own clients and they can earn something more when they share their clients or they share our offer or let's say offer of our plant etc, but they usually focused on pushing of their own services and products. How to motivate them for partnerships and collaborations?

Well, ideally of course this type of partnerships, they work best if the partner you are talking to, they have already a lead related to your specialty or if your specialty is something trending. So for example, you do AI machine learning, this type of things, maybe you integrate some of the AI APIs already and you have some number of cases and you come to a company who doesn't do that. But most likely they, they have this type of request or customers are also interested in this. So this is a trending topic. Then it kind of will help you work it out. Because the issue in these partnerships is always to start and to build trust. Ideally to build trust you need to work together on something. So you need to have some kind of project together. And if they already have a lead, this is like a super super match. Otherwise you need to build some kind of content plan or maybe a plan like newsletters or some emails plan. Call it however you want. But for partners first I will suggest to learn from the industry where they use a lot of partnership marketing, affiliate marketing, this Igaming or gambling and they, they really succeed in that. So the brands, they have a lot of content that they share with their affiliates. So they try to ask them in personal way as well. So they have managers, affiliate managers who talk directly besides this generic content sharing. And these are affiliate managers, they ask okay, what do you do? How can we help you? How can, how can we help you to sell us or to give us more traffic. So do you need more content? Do you need more images, do you need these that where do you have your most audience? And so on and so forth. Especially since partners mostly earn on commission, you need to keep yourself on their there and still talk to them. So besides some newsletters or content you might share with like to all of the partners, you might need to still have some personalized conversations to see how to work together but with especially if you try to follow or to get to agencies like website development agencies, they have a lot of companies like us who are reaching out to them on daily basis. So this is pretty hard. So ideally if you have a chance to go to different conferences or events, try to meet them or if you have someone who can travel, try to meet them. Because this, this is something not every company can do. And personal meeting can like elevate trust level more, much more quickly.

Yeah, I get it from my perspective what I see, if you want somebody to give you lead, give lead to them first. Because sometimes it's. It seems like okay, well it seems natural if we speak about human relations or business, but sometimes we forget that we are business not only to let's say to get but to give as well. Right. So first for my case what I see, I see that some people naturally they produce leads for me because they know me or whatever. And I'm trying let's say to motivate them, to give them more attention, to give them some fresh ideas, to give a little bit more money, whatever, just to warm this naturally natural flows fleets number one. And the second one, when I see that there are some leads in a certain society, so collaborations I'm trying to give value to them. Not just value of using my services, but value of the things that they need. For example, they need leads. Okay, I'm trying to look, okay, whom can I suggest to them, who can I refer to? And when I and then I see that not all of, not every time it works. Not, not every time because sometimes they're not going to say okay, thank you, bye bye, and that's it. So it doesn't work regularly, but some people consider it as a real good value and they start sharing contacts and leads in return. So I think of course for us as a founders it's very hard to do but because a lot of different types of activities that we are facing. But sometimes if you face the naturally come you should support this activity and you should treat them differently, even more treat more give more attention than to natural to everyday clients because it can be a flow of potential clients that can generate you more leads and then to give more, to get more. So like give and give. Then then expect to get something because if you give leads, people will share. That's normally but of course if there are Some certain areas, like in gaming, gambling, they give, they have special processes that are stable but we have to invent something to, to, to, to work with that. But yeah, asking is good. I think if you can ask me, okay, what do you need or what do you need to sell my services? One get more commission. Yeah, it can be, can be a good case, not just okay, if you sell it to someone, you get a commission. Okay, personally, me, I've got maybe a dozen of these offers each week, but I can distinguish one from another. There is no reason for me to, to even speak about that because I don't see a difference. I don't see a value for my community. So that's why, why should I do that? Why should I spend time for that? There's nothing under. So it's like everyday commission. So that's it. Okay. Okay, that's good. Okay. So and to summarize it, I think it was valuable because we've got some gems inside this conversation. We can start it small, we can do it with National Pace, can share something personal. We can base on stories. What will be your, let's say several advices for founders of software development companies. How to start with the content marketing. What will be, let's say the most natural steps to start getting leads and getting warm leads from the content market?

I would say first we need to try to imagine ourselves as our own customer. So who is this person, what they are? This is pretty typical thing you will read if you read a book about building ICP or searching who is your customer. But this is the most efficient exercise if it is done as an exercise. We did it before when we had the sales school and we were literally putting people in front of each other and they were playing the role of the customer and someone who is coming to them as a software development team. So just imagine yourself as one of your customers and think about what do you do. You also have probably families, some interests and sometimes you might have time to read through this type of proposals. We are sharing our content. We are sharing maybe on weekends, maybe only during the evening hours when your family is asleep and you, you have this time. And this will also give you an understanding of how to reach to your audience and how brief or how long should be your message, how you can grab their attention so how you can get them interested in, in what you're, what you're writing. Talk to your customers, ideally talk to them whom you know well, with whom you work. If you have long term customers or even like had some previous customers, just talk to them and ask them what do they read, what are the topics they're interested in, how do they search? When we get leads now we always ask how did you find us? Like what did you search for? Like we are trying to understand their mind and this will help you also talk to your sales people if you have any, or talk to yourself if you do the sales on your own and think about what are the repeatable stuff you're talking or explaining on these calls. All this information can help you build the content plan. So ideally it should consist of some topics that you are talking about on sales calls. And you can share in the blog post which also can bring you value. And you can share this text again to your leads after calls. Partly it can be some topics related to the industry you're working in and your leads may suggest they are reading. And partly it can be some some like topic where your expertise is so you can explain something or advise something and talk about that. And also a part where some of these content pieces they can be optimized for search engines. Not all of them can be and this is also okay, but some of them can be and just you need to also ask SEO specialists or if you are the one too you can search yourself what are the trends there, what people are searching for and try to also make some posts that can also get some traffic because otherwise if your post, even if you are writing amazing posts, no one is seeing it like it is unfortunately worth nothing because it can't bring you any any value. So this probably would be the first things to do and just try to be consistent if you post even on LinkedIn or somewhere. And don't forget that you can share not only text, you can share some of the content from your website on LinkedIn but don't do it also too much. You can share just some thoughts over there and maybe just experiment with some of the call to actions on inside of your content. Sometimes you can ask your audience to talk to you. Sometimes you can lead them somewhere to an article, maybe to some other post even not on your website. Or maybe you can offer them to meet or maybe you can ask for advice about some city or some place where you're going to if this is a conference. So just try to make it a bit different. Not not only post with the link to your blog and like okay, just read it.

Okay. Okay. Thank you. Anastasia. Are you open if someone from our subscribers will message you directly and ask you several questions regarding the content? Because I see you got a huge experience in that is it. Okay. That someone will contact you and ask you. Okay?

Absolutely.

Okay, thank you. Well, thank you for your time, guys. If you want to contact us to see, you can use the link below and ask us to see your very specific questions. Because I've got a lot of questions regarding the content because it's like it's not my core activity, but I face a lot of that because yeah, we need to use content. And if you need people who will help you to do the right content strategy to, let's say, to sharp your mind and for you to understand, let's say, how it works, what you can get out of that, you can connect, you can contact Nastasia and she will explain it to you, let's say block by block. And we'll provide you with a certain, let's say, playbook, how to, how to deal with that and what you can get out of that. So an, thank you for your time. I think that you gave several good emphasis points that will help to understand. Okay. How, how these tools can be used to get to the targets, the goals that people are looking for. I think it was valuable. So thank you for your time and hope that you can share some more insights with us a little bit later on.

Thank you. I will be happy to talk more. Really like there are a lot of stories to share and a lot of things to talk about and happy to answer specific questions of your audience too.

Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. A plan like newsletters or some emails plan, call it however you want want, but for partners first I would suggest to learn from the industry where they use a lot of partnership marketing, affiliate marketing, this Igaming or gambling. And they, they really succeed in that. So they brands, they have a lot of content that they share with their affiliates. So they try to ask them in personal way as well. So they have managers, affiliate managers who talk, talk directly besides this generic content sharing. And these are affiliate managers. They ask, okay, what do you do? How can we help you? How we can, how can we help you?